Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Window on Eurasia: Kremlin’s Media Monopoly Cutting It Off from Reality Just as Censorship Did Soviet Leaders, Sulakshin Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, December 31 – By imposing
a monopoly on Russia’s information space, Vladimir Putin and his regime risk
falling into the trap that leaders at the end of the Soviet period complained
about: “their ears hear one thing but their eyes see something else,” a
development that was fatal for the USSR and could be for Putin’s Russia as
well, Stepan Sulakshin says.

Sulakshin, head of the Moscow Center
for Scientific Political Thought and Ideology, says that “information war is a
prerogative of the state [but] an absolute monopoly in the media leads to
degradation and decay” and “propaganda which goes beyond rationality and
expediency” (newdaynews.ru/propaganda/522198.html).

Moscow today,
like other governments, is telling itself that it has the right to impose such
a monopoly because of the war in Ukraine, but that argument, the analyst says,
missed the point that “war is not something that happens every day” and that the
greater control the regime has over the media, the more likely it will not know
what is really happening and not be able to avoid decay.

Many commentators
have warned, Sulakshin says, that the government’s control of the media is
leading to the zombification of the population, but they have paid less
attention to the ways in which it is leading at the same time and for the same
reasons to an elite which believes its own propaganda.

In that
situation, he argues, “if the blind are leading the blind, then it is well
known to which cemetery they will come as a result.”

Any government
has a right to put its message out via the media, Sulakshin says, but it must
be careful not to destroy the media as a source of genuine information and
feedback by going too far and setting up a monopoly. When that happens, the
authorities typically explicit their possibilities, do not get a critical
response, and lose their way.

A vicious circle
emerges, Sulakshin says. “The more stupid and mistakenly the authorities act,
the more harm their actions inflict on the country … the more efforts the state
media spend on explaining such measures as the most intelligence, wise,
necessary and positive for the country.”Those sending the message believe it as much as those to whom it is
directed.

And it is
entirely possible, Sulakshin says, that the audience will wake up to the fraud
even sooner than the elite. That is because “the population sooner or later
will understand” that the regime’s claim that 85 percent” of Russians support
it is implausible given the problems and that that in turn means “our state
organism, including its information part is also seriously ill.”